this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2026
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/32524920

I watched several videos on a Combine Harvester's inner workings and I still don't understand how this thing works.

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[–] YellowParenti@lemmy.wtf 23 points 5 days ago

This reminded me of a mini documentary on helping subsistence farmers in India. Since the farms were small and irregular, they couldn't recommend powered harvesters to be shared. They basically squatted down and used sickles. It was a whole family affair as kids as small as 3 were needed to harvest quickly and get it to market.

They introduced scythes with baskets to catch and softly drop the grain or whatever to the side.

this isn't that documentary, but it does show the slow going of using a sickle at first. It then shows how much faster the scythe is.

The documentary also showed how some were reluctant as the kids were free and basically the sickle was how it had always been done. So they had contests of 5 farmers against one guy on the scythe and a kid picking up the wheat and putting it on a cart. I think it was 30 meters long. The scythe had the job finished and helping the kid finish putting the grain in the cart before the other farmers had gotten halfway.